Escape Velocity

"Oscar-Zulu - Wilson Tower," a faraway voice crackled in his headset, "you may begin your manoeuvres at your discretion."
High above the stout tower building, white wings circled lazily overhead like a giant vulture drifting in rising columns of Savannah air.
"Roger, Tower," came the reply over the radio.
The right hand moves smoothly forward, taking the control column with it as the left hand comes back slightly on the throttle.  The whisper of the slipstream sliding by the long canopy builds its breath to a dull moan.  On the instrument panel, one needle creeps up as another unwinds madly.  Suddenly, the sunlight streaming into the cockpit is eclipsed by shadow. 
Eyes turn upwards, a smile creases sunburned skin.
A cloud - as soft and pure as driven snow.
"Beautiful," says the pilot. 
A rattle passes through the airframe.
The pilot mutters an airspeed, barely audible over the hum of the engine and the rising crescendo of the slipstream.
Then, a smooth pull on the stick, wings flexing and the earth falls away underneath the propeller's disc.
Arms heavy, that intoxicating feeling in the pit of the stomach...and Oscar-Zulu bounds upwards with vigour and grace.
Up, up and up - lean on the right rudder as the sound of the slipstream fades and gravity begins to excise its inevitable toll.  The RF-5 continues its upwards arc, cresting the top where up is down and down is up, and the pilot feels light in his seat and in his heart.
A quick glance down reveals the billowing top of the cloud...and Wilson Airport below and beyond.
Now, sweeping elegantly down the arc's reverse, the engine's hum grows to a moan, life returns to the stick, both man and machine brace as they hurtle downwards.
The needles do their familiar dance.
A rush of speed and Oscar-Zulu sweeps under the cloud's skirt and out the other end, clawing skywards in a vertical climb.
As the craft hurtles upwards, the pilot falls victim to the dream that perhaps they will never stop accelerating, never stop climbing.
Maybe, just maybe and only this once, they might reach escape velocity and break the bonds of gravity.
Alas, not yet and not this time.  The airspeed begins to decay.  The breath of the slipstream fades.  A more absolute silence has never been heard.  There is a mechanical clap as the pilot's left foot moves the rudder pedal to full deflection.  Some 20 feet behind him, the rudder responds and the nose is forced left through the pivot.  Muscle memory faithfully applies opposite aileron to hold the wing down and Oscar-Zulu slices cleanly through the horizon.
As the aviator hangs in his straps, once again falling towards earth, the flanks of the cloud slide by only inches above his head...the wispy tendrils caressing the aircraft's wooden frame.

The day is December 14th, 1972.  My father has fallen madly in love with aerobatics.  The notation in his logbook: "21 - loop, stall turn, chandelle."

The front cover and first page of my dad's copy of 5Y-AOZ's pilot'soperating handbook.  (Family Collection)

The very next afternoon, my dad returns to the airport and calls on "Biff" Hamilton and his Chipmunk.

A dozen flights would follow in Chipmunk KLY, Beagle Pup AKG and Cessna 150 Aerobat ARG.  The notations in his logbook provide a poor picture of the joy these flights inspired.

The pages of my dad's logbook from December '72 and January '73. (Family Collection)

In September 1983, two months before I was born, "Biff" Hamilton won the intermediate category in an aerobatics competition at the Gatineau Airport.
It is very likely that my dad was at that meet as a spectator.
An Ottawa Citizen reporter named Doug Kelly interviewed Hamilton after his win.  Hamilton called aerobatics "the purest form of flying."
"Some people play golf for their kicks, I fly aerobatics," Hamilton is quoted as saying.  "Does that seem so odd?"
At the time, "Biff" had left the African plains for his home in Stratford.  He told Kelly he had learned to fly 40 years ago.
"Biff" would be nearing 90 now.
5Y-KLY ended up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as VP-WEV in the early 1980s.  It then surfaced some time later in South Africa under the registration ZS-VYU.  In 2005, it was acquired by a preservation organisation.

EX RAF WG-315, 5Y-KLY, & VP-WEV now registered as ZS-VYU.  The aircraft is pictured at Rand Airport in Germiston, South Africa (Photo Courtesy S. Geer)

A newspaper article reporting the emergency landing of 5Y-AOZ near Wilson.  Wilken CFI Alan Coulson is crouching by the nose gear. The Fournier is incorrectly identified as a "Cessna". (Family Collection)

5Y-AOZ met a crueler fate.  She was sold to an owner in Germany as D-KCIQ before being registered in the UK as G-BDOZ in December of 1975. 

G-BDOZ at Leicester, UK on July 5th, 1981 - less than 2 months later, it would be destroyed.  (Photo Courtesy: Dave Mangham)

And then on August 30th, 1981, during take-off from Fenland Aerodrome, Holbeach St. Johns, Lincolnshire with pilot and passenger on board, Oscar-Zulu dropped a wing, descended sharply and struck the ground, tearing off the right wing and cartwheeling to its destruction.
The pilot was hurt.  His passenger escaped injury.
The post-crash investigation revealed no mechanical reason for the crash.  The investigators concluded that, during the right turn following departure, the aircraft passed over a field of burning pea stubble.  They believed the thermal instability caused by the burning brush may have led to the crash.
The insurance company sold the wreck to a chap in High Wycombe who stripped out the avionics the sold the rest to a J. Hassell.  Mr. Hassell wanted to rebuild the RF-5 but, in his words, "ran out of money and inclination."  In 1982, he sold "Oscar-Zulu's" carcass to a man at Southend Airport who broke it up for spare parts.
AKG and ARG have faded from memory.  They now live only in the sinews and synapses of those pilots lucky enough to have flung them about the sky with skill and abandon.
Aerobatics, however, is alive and well...and is perhaps, my father's most enduring gift to me.

Intermission 1

In the early 1950s, the skies over Europe had been quiet and free of bloodshed for several years.  The Commonwealth no longer had such a desperate need for eager young men to bravely take to the skies in defense of life and liberty.  Airfields across the United Kingdom were clogged with Dehavilland DHC-1 Chipmunk trainers...and the Royal Air Force decided to get rid of them.
The famed trainers, the mounts upon which post-war aviators had cut their teeth less than a decade ago, were scattered to the winds...an aviation diaspora.
A dozen found their way to Kenya.  At Wilson Airport, the Aero Club of East Africa saw the demobbed British aircraft as cheap and readily available alternatives to new trainers.  The Aero Club bought at least three.  It may have purchased as many as six.

Chipmunk VP-KLW (before change over to 5Y) at Wilson Airport on March 11th, 1956. (Photo Courtesy: Joe Barr)

Chipmunk 5Y-KLS equipped with the rudder from sister ship KLW captured at Wilson in August 1971. (Photo Courtesy: Dave Welch)

With the "new" airplanes, came at least one heart-sick aviator looking for a job and a chance to keep flying his beloved "Chippie."
On September 12th, 1947, Flight Lieutenant J.N. "Biff" Hamilton relinquished his Queen's commission in the Royal Air Force.  He had served as an instructor pilot and was old enough to have served during the second world war.
In June 1972, "Biff" Hamilton would have been 49 or 50 years old. Now a flight instructor at the Aero Club of East Africa, the Canadian was far from home but happy to be playing with the airplanes he knew so well.
Across the ramp at Wilken Aviation, my father was growing tired of the Cherokee 140.  So tired in fact, that he had been tinkering in a hangar for some time building, of all things, an airplane.  His intent was to fly it north to San Giacomo and land on a patch of grass carved into the sunflower choked fields of his hometown.  He would return home sooner than he thought.
To keep his hand in flying, he ventured across the ramp to the Aero Club and its small fleet of ex-military trainers. He did 5 flights under the greenhouse canopy of Chipmunk 5Y-KLY with "Biff" riding in the back. 
And then, on June 27th, one day after his 5th flight in the Chipmunk, my grandfather died.
Instead of returning home a conqueror atop the aircraft he had built, my father bought a plane ticket to Rome and rented a car.  Then he made the lonely three hour drive east to mourn.
When he returned in September, a little older and still grieving, not much had changed at Wilson.
"Biff" was still at it.
The Chipmunks sat in a neat little row, their highly polished aluminium skin simmering in the heat and shimmering in the golden sunlight...beckoning.
However, another siren's song soared higher.
In my dad's absence, Wilken had acquired a brand new Sportavia RF-5.

RF-5 5Y-AOZ in March 1974 at Wilson.  (Photo Courtesy: Terry Murphy)

The RF-5 was a light sport motor glider.  In layman's terms, the pilot could take off and fly under the power of the engine but, due to the aircraft's glider pedigree, had the option of shutting down the engine and gliding to earth.
Over the next few weeks, my dad learned to fly the unique craft with gorgeous lines...finding unconditional comfort and promise in its gull-like grace.

Wings

My dad earned his wings on May 6th, 1971 after passing the private flight test on his first attempt.
He had used 9 pages of his logbook and logged 62 hours and 5 minutes of flight time - nearly 12 of which was solo.
A man named McAuliffe signed him off.  His mount for the flight was 5Y-AJI - the same aircraft he took up solo for the first time.

East African Private Pilot Licence (Aeroplanes) No 2110 (K.1964) issued  May 10th, 1971. (Family Collection)

His private flight training was done exclusively on Wilken's fleet of Piper Cherokee 140s.
The men who sat next to him were Sinton, Lennox, Amos, Corner, and Coulson.
Each man had a hand in shaping my father as a pilot.
Sinton, by far, made the greatest impression.
My dad spoke fondly and often of Coulson.
He characterised Amos as "mean" because he was known to rap his students on the knees with a bony fist if they made a mistake.
Either Lennox or Corner carried a pen knife - reportedly as a way to swiftly and painfully bring a student back to reality in the event they ever froze on the controls and thus lessened the instructor's chances of  dying peacefully in bed as an old man.
These men have all receded slowly into the crawling abyss of the past but not before leaving an indelible mark.
The aircraft too are likely gone...
In the best case scenario, they are still flying - tended to lovingly by a pilot who has no idea of the role they played in this story.
Some are rotting in the African sun, pushed up behind a Quonset hangar in the corner of an overgrown field, the once shiny aluminium skin pockmarked and bleeding rivulets of reddish brown rust; registrations worn off, vinyl seats cracked and vomiting yellowish padding, windshields chipped, yellowed and cobwebbed.
In the worst case scenario, they've been melted down into kettles or garbage tins.
I know the certain fates of only two...and a tantalizing detail regarding two others.

PA-28-140 5Y-ALG breaking formation near Nairobi, 1970 or 1971.  Murray Sinton is likely riding right seat.  ALG was involved in an accident of an unknown nature on November 3rd, 1974. (Family Collection)

5Y-AGE was sold to the Seychelles Aero Club.  It crashed on the African island nation December 11th 1973 after running out of fuel during a cross country flight from Mahe to Praslin.  The pilot and lone occupant was killed.
5Y-ALG is the subject of a cryptic article in the Kenya Gazette from November 5th, 1974.  In it, D.C. Stewart, Chief Inspector of Accidents, solicits anyone with information regarding an accident at Savani Air Strip near Nandi two days prior to come forward. 
5Y-AJI also appears in the accident investigations section of Kenya Gazette.  On February 27th, 1975, it was involved in an accident 500 yards from a private strip owned by A. Roote. The government made the same appeal as it did in ALG's case.
5Y-AIB crashed into Tanzania's Rufiji River on September 11th 1985. The pilot, a 43-year-old man named Herring, was practising a forced approach into Mtemere Airstrip when he deliberately shut down the engine. The aircraft was destroyed. Herring lived.
It had been less than 70 years since Orville and Wilbur Wright gave up on bicycles to build flying machines and despite the soaring heights the industry had attained, flying could be dangerous. Aviators lived, and often died,  in spectacular fashion.
Three of my dad's friends starred death in the face - and two blinked.
The first flew into power lines while on a pleasure flight with his pregnant wife.
The other taxied into a small ditch while on a solo cross country stop at a remote dirt strip.  He tried to free the aircraft by pulling on the propeller...but he had left the magnetos on. The engine caught - decapitating the pilot.  They found him two days later - the aircraft standing silent guard over its former master.  Her tanks had run dry.

My dad, a friend and his sister with a Cessna 172 (likely 5Y-ALW) at an unidentified airfield.  ALW crashed  in September 2001 - killing two. (Family Collection)

Dad riding back seat. (Family Collection)

Despite the obvious risks, my dad took to flying with a voracious appetite.  As soon as he finished his private licence, he embarked on finding and mastering new airplanes.
He started with the venerable Piper Super Cub.
Then came the stalwart Chipmunk trainer and finally the graceful Fournier RF-5.

These experiences would be his first tastes of tail-draggers and aerobatics...which would, in turn, lead him to C-FFAM ten years later.

First Solo

September 2nd, 1970.

C-FFAM is still in paper form - sketches on the ruled pages of a black notebook.  Her registration is still unclaimed - one of thousands on the Department of Transport books. 

It would be months before someone picked up the notebook with any real intent.  

It would be years before the red and white Mini-Plane would spring off the pages of that tiny notebook - its 85 horsepower engine breaking the silence of an Ontario airport.

Dad and a colleague with the company Land Rover near Nairobi, 1969 or 1970. (Family Collection)

Thousands of miles away, across one ocean, three continents and the heavy heat and thick haze of the equator, my dad is driving his Landrover to Wilson Airport.  

The red dust churned up by his tires catches the rising sun in gritty flashes of tawny golds and browns.  The air of this September dawn in pleasantly crisp and cool.  The sun's newborn rays have yet to tease the Kenyan plains with their warmth.

In the distance, an airplane's engine coughs and catches.

Today is my dad's 25th birthday.  He woke at the ungodly hour of four in the morning.

The Kenyan uniform: T-shirt, khaki shorts, flip flops...and a Land Rover in Nairobi, 1970. (Family Collection)

Today's lesson is the circuit.  The last 15 lessons - roughly 13 hours in the air - have been the circuit.  My father has the racetrack patterns around each of Wilson's two runways etched in his mind. He could, if he wished and was devoid of any common sense, fly the circuit with his eyes closed. For exactly one month, all he has been doing is take-offs and landings, downwind and pre-landing checks, rotations and round-outs.  For most of that time, Murray Sinton has been sitting next to him, helping to hone a ham-handed student into one that stands a reasonable chance of leaving the earth in an airplane...and returning to it in one piece.

Today is different.  

When my father yells "clear" and cranks the engine on 5Y-AJI, the instructor is Lennox.  Lennox is checking Sinton's work. 

The time is 6:15 when Juliet-India climbs away from Wilson Airport.  The horizon is beginning to boil under the east African sun.

Half an hour and four circuits later, the Cherokee returns to earth and taxis slowly to the Wilken ramp.  The door is shoved open against the propeller's idle breath and Lennix slides out onto the wing.  He turns back, crouches behind the shield of the door, cups his hand to his mouth and shouts a few words to the pilot.  A curt nod and the door is pushed closed.  Lennox claps his right hand on the top of the Piper's cabin and steps off the wing's trailing edge to the ground.  He walks backwards for a few feet as the Cherokee's engine picks up and the plane taxis for the runway.

At 6:45, Alpha-Juliet rattles into the air with my dad at the controls solo for the first time.  It is every pilot's first test and every pilot's most private feat of accomplishment.  It is a rite of passage...for when one returns to earth, they do so changed, older, with a hint of swagger in their step and a heart swelling with pride.

The page for September 1970 from my dad's logbook.  His first solo is on the 3rd line. (Family Collection)

I can only imagine what happened inside the sanctum of the cockpit since my dad never spoke of his first solo - at least not in any detail.  About the most I ever garnered only came on the heels of my own first solo some thirty-two years after his.

"I soloed today," I'm speaking into the handset of an ancient, mildewed and rusting payphone in the anteroom of an equally ancient, mildewed and rusting mess hall of a little used, sand-choked scout camp near Les Cedres, Quebec.

"Beautiful," came the muffled reply.  "How was it?"

"Awesome," seemed to be a fitting answer. 

"Did they splash you with water?"

"Yeah."

"Hot or cold?"

"Hot," I said.  "Then cold."

"Mine was cold."  

I could almost hear the twinkle in his eyes.